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Fairly new to Check Point and was doing my first upgrade of a Open Server cluster running R80.40.  Was following this doc: https://sc1.checkpoint.com/documents/R81.20/WebAdminGuides/EN/CP_R81.20_Installation_and_Upgrade_Gui... and it mentions best practice was using the central deployment in SmartConsole.  Great I thought, seems straightforward.  My boss had never used the Smart Console method and always did the step by step procedure but was willing to give the new method a try.

I went into Smart Console, right clicked the R80.40 cluster and chose a version upgrade to R81.20 Take 53.  Everything checked out fine, it kicked off the standby node and started upgrading the server.  Server install finished, it reboots and comes back online running R81.20.  Everything on the standby appears healthy but the task details in Smart Console is just stuck at 100% for the standby and saying "updating products."  We let it sit there a good 20-30 minutes and nothing moved.

Decided to try and bounce the standby one more time and as soon as it started rebooting the Smart Console task changed to 'rebooting' for the standby node and then appeared to try and resume the upgrade steps but because the standby node was down/rebooting they failed.  The task failed out and we ended up just going the 'tried and true' method of the manual steps but I was wondering if we just had a unique situation or is the Smart Console upgrade not ready for prime time yet?

I do have another two clusters to upgrade and will most likely be choosing the Web GUI method and not Smart Console this time. 😄

Thanks!